Distinguished Research Fellowship Program

The aim of the program is to develop a robust pipeline of potential faculty members from different backgrounds and lived experiences. Qualified participants may be able to transition into tenure-track faculty positions in UB's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

The Distinguished Research Fellowship Program seeks candidates with strong academic track records and demonstrated potential to be successful future faculty members.

Preference is given to individuals who are recent graduates or have a few years of post-graduate work and strong academic credentials in areas that have the potential to add to and complement the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences' current research and teaching portfolio.

Fellows are partnered with at least one senior SEAS faculty member, and will gain first-hand experience in coordinating research programs, guiding and mentoring graduate students, and writing proposals. They will also conduct seminars and play active roles in their departments.

Each Fellow receives $100,000, allocated as follows:

• $80,000/year for salary
• $20,000 for moving, immigration, research travel, and computer costs

SEAS invites applicants for a Postdoctoral Fellowship in AI and Society in the University at Buffalo’s new Department of AI and Society (AIS), with a particular interest in interdisciplinary scholars whose research agendas connect the study of AI with a humanistic or social scientific line of study. Examples of candidates we are interested in include scholars who:

• Pursue critical work on AI through a social scientific or humanistic lens (e.g. critical algorithm studies or critical artistic work);
• Use tools from the arts, humanities and/or social sciences to develop new kinds of AI (e.g. new models or new uses of existing models informed by humanistic or social scientific theory);
• Use AI to address social science questions (e.g. computational social science) or humanistic lines of inquiry (e.g. the digital humanities);
• Develop participatory-design-based AI solutions to address societal problems.

These lines of inquiry are by no means exhaustive, but reflect our belief as a department that 1) we cannot have AI systems that are built for society without undertaking meaningful analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of existing AI systems, 2) that AI can, if used effectively, be an important tool in the social sciences and humanities, and 3) that attempts to build “AI for social good” that do not involve impacted communities as first-class citizens from the start of the design process are doomed to fail.

We expect a successful applicant to be an interdisciplinary researcher who ultimately aims to become a transdisciplinary scholar incorporating insights across AI and the arts, humanities and/or one or more of the social sciences. We also expect a successful candidate to work with faculty and experts from multiple fields within the AIS department and/or the UB community in general.

The new AIS department was created with the goal of creating AI systems that are designed to be built by society, for society. We seek to upend the dominant approach where AI systems are built with accuracy as the primary metric and then “fine tuned” for societal considerations. A successful candidate is expected to contribute to our initial attempts to make this vision a reality.